"...I needed to leverage 'all the work' done in .Net...As I discovered, the marriage of .Net and Adhearsion was lovely, thanks to the RESTful RPC [API of Adhearsion]"So David created an example and has graciously shared it with the rest of us. The example includes a component in Adhearsion that has this method extending the 'methods_for :rpc':
Warheads Stacked in the Kitchen
Jason Goecke has a long history in telephony. His unique perspective is built on extensive business experience around the world as well as technical depth. His passion for disruption manifests itself in his on-going support of open source telephony, with the latest phase being his commitment to the Adhearsion project.
TwitterFacebookLinkedInFriendfeedFlickrYoutubeTumblrmetaweblogUsing C#/.Net to Invoke the Adhearsion API via REST
Recently an Adhearsion community member, David Lawal, built upon the PHP/REST example I posted back in February. David comes from a C#/.Net background and was beginning to learn Ruby in order to use Adhearsion. Then, in his own words:
Using PHP to Invoke the Adhearsion API via REST
While Adhearsion is written in Ruby, every effort had been made to make it accessible from virtually any modern development language. The RPC subsystem in Adhearsion makes available several methods for accessing the APIs. Out of the box the RPC methods include Distributed Ruby, STOMP and REST. While we have not included SOAP/XML by default, the framework may be easily extended to make this method available as well.
There are many websites and applications written in PHP. The great thing is that all of those applications may take advantage of what Adhearsion has to offer. In this example we show how to invoke the Adhearsion REST API from a PHP script that could be embedded in virtually any application.
In this case a phone call will be placed between two parties, extension 303 and 304, using the Asterisk originate action. For example, this could be used to build a 'click to call' frame in an existing website. The PHP script creates an Adhearsion class to connect to Adhearsion and then invokes the originate as an HTTP POST with JSON (script available here):
RESTful Click to Call with Adhearsion
One of the great new features of the latest release of Adhearsion is the RESTful RPC API. With the RESTful API one may now use virtually any modern language to interact with Adhearsion to voice enable their apps, including PHP, Perl, Python, Java and more.
Everytime you create a new Adhearsion project the resful_rpc component is installed, just disabled by default. To enable the REST API of your new Adhearsion app, simply do the following from within your project directory:
ahn enable component restful_rpc
Thats it! Your Adhearsion app now has a REST API.
To showcase this capability we have created an example component (restful_clicktocall) that provides a web form to do a 'Click to Call'. The web form is developed using JQuery in order to provide a dynamic interface, using AJAX (but with JSON), that shows call progress. The web form is then served up using the great Sinatra library as the web server that in turn calls Adhearsion methods using the restful_adhearsion client library.
Enough of that, lets see how it works:
[blip.tv ?posts_id=1743747&dest=-1]
Feel free to download the example component here and give it a try yourself.
GrandCentral 2.0 Just Around the Corner?
When I moved back to the US after several years in Europe, just under 2 years ago, I had the unique situation of having no legacy phone number. At this time GrandCentral was still an independent startup in beta offering one phone number to rule them all. I jumped on the opportunity to have a GrandCentral number and then only gave that number out both professionally and personally. Having all of the GrandCentral features was a breath of fresh air at the time, but quickly became stale after the Google acquisition of GrandCentral in July of 2007.
At first I thought the Google acquisition was great, as it seemed to guarantee that number could be relied upon 'for life'. But after over a year and a half of silence, I began to think that all that had happened was that GrandCentral had been forgotten. Would GrandCentral go the way of so many other previous services? This appeared to be a certainty when WebWorkerDaily reported that the GrandCentral SSL Cert was expiring...
Then an eagle eye over at the Google Operating System blog noted that Jeff Huber, SVP of Engineering at Google, commented on a FriendFeed post about the SSL cert story:
Writely + XL2Web + TonicSystems -> Google Docs, Keyhole -> Google Earth/Maps, Urchin + MeasureMap -> Google Analytics, JotSpot -> Google Sites, Zingku -> Google FriendConnect, Android -> Android, DoubleClick -> DoubleClick, Feedburner -> AdSense for Feeds (in-process); sorry about Dodgeball.
... and David Pogue's comment after the post gets it right -- a new version on new infrastructure will be coming soon. Apologies to anyone who has run into issues on the legacy version.
Will this be simply a back-end infrastructure change, or will we see all the great features we have been waiting for in a 2.0 release? I am anxiously awaiting an API for call routing, hooking up my own SIP endpoints and having integration with all of my other Google Apps. Has Google created the killer VSB/SME application platform by adding voice? I certainly hope to find out soon...
